Power To The Edge The RACE Is On Performance-Based Acquisition Evolves – and Transforms Getting IT Is Getting Faster All The Time Developing Technologies Today For The IT Contracts Of Tomorrow Key Defense Contracts Defense IT Contract Guide.pdf [PDF]

Along with his team, Alfred Rivera directs DISA’s Center for Computing Services. The Center is the computing arm for DISA and consists of 13 Defense Enterprise Computing Centers located in the U.S, Europe and in the Pacific.

“We host and operate the DOD’s large enterprise applications for all the services as well as the Defense agencies, which encompasses about 1400 major applications, supporting about 3 million users on a large heterogeneous environment of hosting platforms,” explained Rivera in an interview with 1105 Custom Media.

The Center is also supports applications developed using SOA architecture and is the service provider for DISA’s Net Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) which is in the process of implementing several SOA implementations across the enterprise.

Plus its St. Louis center also hosts the newly launched Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE) that provides the ability for a developer or end user community to quickly provision an operating environment for development purposes.

According to Rivera, the RACE environment is similar to those that are available in industry such as Go Daddy where if somebody has a requirement for a hosting environment to include appropriate processing, storage and memory and development tools, this will provide that capability with the idea of provisioning it within 24 hours.

RACE is offering the ability to provision, at $500 a month, one CPU with 1 gig of memory, 50 gigabytes of storage and a LAMP Stack capability on top of a virtual machine environment. You pay for it with either a government IMPAC credit card or a MIPR (Military Interdepartmental Procurement Request).

Applications Run The Gamut
As far as applications are concerned it crosses the gamut, depending what the customer wants to do said Rivera.

“We are going to provide in the near term, a development capability that is based on a Microsoft or a LAMP stack (a solution stack of software, usually free and open source software, used to run dynamic Web sites or servers
including Linux OS; Apache web server; MySQL database management system; and PHP programming language). Soon to be added will be Sun Solaris capabilities.

“If the customer has a requirement to do some coding and development, using a specific application environment, they now have the ability to push that environment on top of the RACE stack,” explained Rivera. “Once they get the access to that virtual machine, they can push the environment on top of that virtual machine and do whatever development they need to do.”

RACE also handles security concerns as part of the stack.

“We direct all the security issues for a developmental environment,” said Rivera. “But let me caveat that, the offering allows you to provision both a STIG, which is a secure implementation of an operating environment, or an unSTIG, an environment that hasn’t been officially deemed fully compliant from a security guideline perspective, but it is sufficient enough within the guidelines and policies within the department to do development.”

Center deputy director Paul Hallowell further clarified, “From a security standpoint our developers must develop on a STIG machine, a lockdown machine. A lot of developers like to start with an unSTIG machine because it is easier to load their software, get things set up and ready and then apply the security after they’ve installed their application.”

A Giant Leap
RACE has been described as “pay as you go” computing or “application by the drink” and is a giant leap over the traditional means of development according to Rivera.

In a traditional sense a customer would come to DISA with a requirement to stand up a development capability and we would have to go and provision the capability, put it in place, put in the infrastructure, and all the costs associated with ganging up this said Rivera. This could include upfront capital investments and follow on depreciation costs would all be burdened by that customer.

Now “this is computing that’s already available in what we call the network and it’s already available and all that he is paying for is what he has provisioned,” Rivera noted.

“What would have been initially him buying a complete server, potentially not understanding his full requirements, now he’s only buying what he needs. And if he needs more, he simply acquires a bit more and if he needs less, he acquires less. He’s only paying for what he’s using.”

This capability greatly reduces maintenance and all those underlying infrastructure costs that are now part of the RACE computing environment.

“The other thing that’s important is that the customer only pays for what he uses and when he is done, he turns it off. He buys it by the month and when he’s completed what he needs to do from his development perspective and maybe moves into production, he is done with that requirement, it’s turned off, so there’s no residual costs,” noted Rivera.

So, if the customer has another requirement a week later, he or she only has to come back and provision another environment and pay for that. RACE is just DOD taking advantage of a commercial capability that has already been used by those internet developers to just put in place a capability quickly and develop it on a standard architecture.

“That’s probably the second biggest key thing to RACE,” Rivera said. “You are only offering a standard suite of capabilities, which, from a department sense, starts driving standardizations across the enterprise and starts reducing overall costs. This is not new; this is the department now taking advantage of a technology and capabilities that had been used in the industry already in the internet and we are just capitalizing it within our own networks.”

Turning Ideas Into Reality – Fast!
Though it is only the beginning, customers are enthusiastic about RACE – and the speed it provides – said Colonel Joe Means, the project manager for RACE

The customer understands the benefit of being able to quickly provision an environment in less than 24 hours, and you can immediately start developmental testing according to Means.

“You don’t have to go through the acquisition process for hardware and software that could take up to a year; you can have the thought on Monday and be ready to test it out on Tuesday. And if you have quality programmers, you might be able to get it all done in a week,” said Means. 

“The rapid access to this cloud computing environment puts more tools in the hands of developers so that they can do more rapid development, which means that they are taking capability to the war fighter faster.”